Within days of [US-backed terrorist] rebel-supplied videos of dead children and adults in the aftermath of the alleged attack in Douma Francois DeLattre, France’s representative at the UN Security Council, said the videos and photos showed victims with “symptoms of a potent nerve agent combined with chlorine gas”.

The next sentence said “Various chlorinated organic chemicals were found”. The indirect reference to chlorine was reported in many media as proof of the use of lethal gas. According to Alex there were huge internal arguments at the OPCW before the Interim report was released. Chlorinated organic chemicals (COCs) are present in the natural environmentso one crucial point in discovering what actually happened at Douma was to measure the amount in the locations where the two cylinders were found and in the other parts of the two buildings and the street outside.

As Alex put it, “if the finding of these chemicals at the alleged site is to be used as an indicator that chlorine gas was present in the atmosphere, they should at least be shown to be present at levels significantly higherthan what is present in the environment already”.

But when the analysis of these key levels came back from the laboratories the results were kept with Sami Barrek, a Tunisian who was the Douma fact-finding mission’s leader. Against normal expectationsthey were not passed on to the inspector who was drafting the OPCW’s interim report on Douma.

The [drafting] inspector did, however, have the analysis from the samples of blood, hair, and other biological datafrom eleven alleged victims who had gone from Douma to Turkey. In no case did the samples reveal any relevant chemicals. On this basis he wrote in his report that the signs and symptoms of victims were not consistent with poisoning from chlorine. Instead of an attack producing multiple fatalities there had been“a non chemical-related event”, it said.

The language was low-key, in part, as Alex put it, because of the tension and anxiety involved when evidence doesn’t match what it is thought that management wants to hear. But the implications of implying a non-chemical eventwere dramatic. Like the engineering report, it hinted that the Douma incident may have been staged by [US backed terrorists] opposition activists. Alex described it as “the elephant in the roomwhich no-one dared mention explicitly”.

When the inspector’s report was submitted to senior management, silence ensued. A few weeks later on the eve of the expected publication the inspector who had drafted the reportdiscoveredthat management was going to issue a redacted version on June 22 2018 without the knowledge of most of the Douma Fact-Finding Mission. Its conclusions contradicted the inspector’s version.By then the inspector had learnt that the results of the quantitative analysisof the samples from the allegedly attacked buildings had beendelivered to management from the test laboratories but not passed on to the inspectors.He got sight of the results which indicated that the levels of COCs[Chlorinated organic chemicals] were much lower than what would be expected in environmental samples. They were comparable to and even lower than those given in the World Health Organisation’s guidelines on recommended permitted levels of trichlorophenol and other COCs [Chlorinated organic chemicals] in drinking water.The redacted version of the report made no mentionof the findings.

Alex described this omission as “deliberate and irregular”. “Had they been included, the public would have seen that the levels of COCs [Chlorinated organic chemicals] found were no higher than you would expect in any household environment”, he said.

The inspector who drafted the original report was furious when he realized it was to bereplaced bya doctored management version. He wrote an email of complaint to the OPCW’s director general.The DG was Ahmet Uzumcu,a Turkish diplomat but his chef de cabinet, the man considered to have the most power in the OPCWon day-to-day issues was Bob Fairweather, a British career diplomat. (He has since been succeeded by Sebastien Braha, a diplomat fromanother anti-Assad government, France).In his email the inspector complained that it was wrong for the new report to describethe levels of COCs [Chlorinated organic chemicals] as high. He insisted that his original 105-page report be published.

This request was rejected but Sami Barrek, the team leader, was put in charge of replacing the doctored version with what turned out to be a toned-down but still misleading report. During the editing four of the Douma inspectors,including Ian Henderson, the engineering expert, had managed to get Barrek to agree that the low levels of COCs [Chlorinated organic chemicals] should be mentioned.On the day before the new publication date, July 6, they found that the levels were again being omitted.

Two days later the interim report was released. That morning, Alex recalled,“a senior colleague told us: ‘First floor [management] says that for the OPCW’s credibility we have to have a smoking gun”. Meanwhile,Fairweather asked the inspectors if he could get back the emails of complaint, including any which had been put into the trash folder. They complied.

After Alex’s briefing I emailed Fairweather with a request that he explainwhy he had facilitated the [illegal occupiers of a third of Syrian land] US officials’ meeting with the inspectors as well as why he had recalled emails. He did not reply.

The final Douma report which was published in March this year [2019] also failed to give any quantitative analysis of the COC [Chlorinated organic chemicals] samples. But its thrust went much further than the interim report.It stated that the OPCW concluded that the evidence from the Douma investigation provides “reasonable groundsthat the use of a toxic chemical as a weapontook place”.

Alex argued that the concept of “reasonable grounds” was undefined. What should have been donein the report, he said, was to set out alternative hypotheses for what had occurred in Douma and then assess the balance of probabilities of the various options and conclude which was the most likely.

Added: US is still a UK colony as Trump exemplifies by automatically putting wishes of UK and its “magical” monarchy before those of Americans or at least his voters. Trump promised certain documents to the American people, then at the last minute changed his mind, saying UK “allies” asked him not to for alleged “security” reasons. The fact is the “security” excuse no longer exists because the worst news about our “security” has already become public, which is that the US government criminally and massively sponsors Islamic terrorism with billions of US tax dollars. US Congress even refuses to pass the “Stop Arming Terrorists“ bill. Thus,what passes for US government has become a deadly enemy of Americans and all humanity and completely unqualified to pass judgement on alleged “security” interests of any human being. Since UK also sponsors terror, US citizens should never again be told that US government information is being withheld from us as a favor to UK “security” interests. Obviously, the US government should never again endorse any terrorist UK government negative accusations about Russia or any other country.